Some service providers aggregate content about merchants and provide the content for public consumption. For example, merchant directory service providers may obtain content about merchants and provide the content via a site of the service provider and/or via a publication that is available to individuals. The content may include location information of the merchants, such as a physical address, contact information for the merchants (e.g. email address, phone number, etc.), descriptions of items offered by the merchants, reviews of the merchants, and so forth.
To avoid providing duplicate information for certain merchants, the service providers may limit the sources of information about merchants. In some cases, the service providers may merely provide content about merchants that is provided directly by the merchants. In other instances, the service providers may provide structured forms for providing information about merchants, such as providing reviews for merchants via particular pages of a service provider site. Additionally, some service providers may accept information about merchants from a number of sources, but the information is often filtered and consolidated manually. In certain situations, the manual filtering and consolidation of information about merchants from multiple sources is time-consuming and inefficient.
Thus, the availability of information about merchants is often limited due to service providers obtaining merchant information from a limited number of sources, due to the inefficient techniques used to consolidate information about merchants from multiple sources, or both. Limited availability of information about merchants can lead to dissatisfaction and frustration among consumers that often search multiple information sources to find the information they are looking for with respect to any particular merchant. Additionally, merchants are unable to utilize a single service provider to make their information available to the largest number of consumers possible.